Against The Grain by Joris-Karl Huysmans

Its easy to link to paragraphs in the Full Text ArchiveIf this page contains some material that you want to link to but you don't want your visitors to have to scroll down the whole page just hover your mouse over the relevent paragraph and click the bookmark icon that appears to the left of it. The address of that paragraph will appear in the address bar of your browser. For further details about how you can link to the Full Text Archive please refer to our linking page.

His hunger persisted. He lingered over a piece of blue Stilton cheese,made quick work of a rhubarb tart, and to vary his drinking, quenchedhis thirst with porter, that dark beer which smells of Spanishlicorice but which does not have its sugary taste.

He breathed deeply. Not for years had he eaten and drunk so much. Thischange of habit, this choice of unexpected and solid food had awakenedhis stomach from its long sleep. He leaned back in his chair, lit acigarette and prepared to sip his coffee into which gin had beenpoured.

The rain continued to fall. He heard it patter on the panes whichformed a ceiling at the end of the room; it fell in cascades down thespouts. No one was stirring in the room. Everybody, utterly weary, wasindulging himself in front of his wine glass.

Tongues were now wagging freely. As almost all the English men andwomen raised their eyes as they spoke, Des Esseintes concluded thatthey were talking of the bad weather; not one of them laughed. Hethrew a delighted glance on their suits whose color and cut did notperceivably differ from that of others, and he experienced a sense ofcontentment in not being out of tune in this environment, of being, insome way, though superficially, a naturalized London citizen. Then hesuddenly started. "And what about the train?" he asked himself. Heglanced at his watch: ten minutes to eight. "I still have nearly ahalf-hour to remain here." Once more, he began to muse upon the planhe had conceived.

In his sedentary life, only two countries had ever attracted him:Holland and England.

He had satisfied the first of his desires. Unable to keep away, onefine day he had left Paris and visited the towns of the Low Lands, oneby one.

In short, nothing but cruel disillusions had resulted from this trip.He had fancied a Holland after the works of Teniers and Steen, ofRembrandt and Ostade, in his usual way imagining rich, unique andincomparable Ghettos, had thought of amazing kermesses, continualdebauches in the country sides, intent for a view of that patriarchalsimplicity, that jovial lusty spirit celebrated by the old masters.

Certainly, Haarlem and Amsterdam had enraptured him. The unwashedpeople, seen in their country farms, really resembled those typespainted by Van Ostade, with their uncouth children and their old fatwomen, embossed with huge breasts and enormous bellies. But of theunrestrained joys, the drunken family carousals, not a whit. He had toadmit that the Dutch paintings at the Louvre had misled him. They hadsimply served as a springing board for his dreams. He had rushedforward on a false track and had wandered into capricious visions,unable to discover in the land itself, anything of that real andmagical country which he had hoped to behold, seeing nothing at all,on the plots of ground strewn with barrels, of the dances ofpetticoated and stockinged peasants crying for very joy, stampingtheir feet out of sheer happiness and laughing loudly.

Decidedly nothing of all this was visible. Holland was a country justlike any other country, and what was more, a country in no wiseprimitive, not at all simple, for the Protestant religion with itsformal hypocricies and solemn rigidness held sway here.

The memory of that disenchantment returned to him. Once more heglanced at his watch: ten minutes still separated him from the train'sdeparture. "It is about time to ask for the bill and leave," he toldhimself.

He felt an extreme heaviness in his stomach and through his body."Come!" he addressed himself, "let us drink and screw up our courage."He filled a glass of brandy, while asking for the reckoning. Anindividual in black suit and with a napkin under one arm, a sort ofmajordomo with a bald and sharp head, a greying beard withoutmoustaches, came forward. A pencil rested behind his ear and heassumed an attitude like a singer, one foot in front of the other; hedrew a note book from his pocket, and without glancing at his paper,his eyes fixed on the ceiling, near a chandelier, wrote whilecounting. "There you are!" he said, tearing the sheet from his notebook and giving it to Des Esseintes who looked at him with curiosity,as though he were a rare animal. What a surprising John Bull, hethought, contemplating this phlegmatic person who had, because of hisshaved mouth, the appearance of a wheelsman of an American ship.

At this moment, the tavern door opened. Several persons enteredbringing with them an odor of wet dog to which was blent the smell ofcoal wafted by the wind through the opened door. Des Esseintes wasincapable of moving a limb. A soft warm languor prevented him fromeven stretching out his hand to light a cigar. He told himself: "Comenow, let us get up, we must take ourselves off." Immediate objectionsthwarted his orders. What is the use of moving, when one can travel ona chair so magnificently? Was he not even now in London, whose aromasand atmosphere and inhabitants, whose food and utensils surroundedhim? For what could he hope, if not new disillusionments, as hadhappened to him in Holland?

He had but sufficient time to race to the station. An overwhelmingaversion for the trip, an imperious need of remaining tranquil, seizedhim with a more and more obvious and stubborn strength. Pensively, helet the minutes pass, thus cutting off all retreat, and he said tohimself, "Now it would be necessary to rush to the gate and crowd intothe baggage room! What ennui! What a bore that would be!" Then herepeated to himself once more, "In fine, I have experienced and seenall I wished to experience and see. I have been filled with Englishlife since my departure. I would be mad indeed to go and, by anawkward trip, lose those imperishable sensations. How stupid of me tohave sought to disown my old ideas, to have doubted the efficacy ofthe docile phantasmagories of my brain, like a very fool to havethought of the necessity, of the curiosity, of the interest of anexcursion!"

"Well!" he exclaimed, consulting his watch, "it is now time to returnhome."

This time, he arose and left, ordered the driver to bring him back tothe Sceaux station, and returned with his trunks, packages, valises,rugs, umbrellas and canes, to Fontenay, feeling the physicalstimulation and the moral fatigue of a man coming back to his homeafter a long and dangerous voyage.

Chapter 12

During the days following his return, Des Esseintes contemplated hisbooks and experienced, at the thought that he might have beenseparated from them for a long period, a satisfaction as complete asthat which comes after a protracted absence. Under the touch of thissentiment, these objects possessed a renewed novelty to his mind, andhe perceived in them beauties forgotten since the time he hadpurchased them.

Everything there, books, bric-a-brac and furniture, had an individualcharm for him. His bed seemed the softer by comparison with the hardbed he would have occupied in London. The silent, discreetministrations of his servants charmed him, exhausted as he was at thethought of the loud loquacity of hotel attendants. The methodicalorganization of his life made him feel that it was especially to beenvied since the possibility of traveling had become imminent.

He steeped himself in this bath of habitude, to which artificialregrets insinuated a tonic quality.

But his books chiefly preoccupied him. He examined them, re-arrangedthem on the shelves, anxious to learn if the hot weather and the rainshad damaged the bindings and injured the rare paper.

He began by moving all his Latin books; then he arranged in a neworder the special works of Archelaus, Albert le Grand, Lully andArnaud de Villanova treating of cabbala and the occult sciences;finally he examined his modern books, one by one, and was happy toperceive that all had remained intact.

This collection had cost him a considerable sum of money. He would notsuffer, in his library, the books he loved to resemble other similarvolumes, printed on cotton paper with the watermarks of _Auvergne_.

Formerly in Paris he had ordered made, for himself alone, certainvolumes which specially engaged mechanics printed from hand presses.Sometimes, he applied to Perrin of Lyons, whose graceful, clear typewas suitable for archaic reprints of old books. At other times hedispatched orders to England or to America for the execution of modernliterature and the works of the present century. Still again, heapplied to a house in Lille, which for centuries had possessed acomplete set of Gothic characters; he also would send requisitions tothe old Enschede printing house of Haarlem whose foundry still has thestamps and dies of certain antique letters.

He had followed the same method in selecting his papers. Finallygrowing weary of the snowy Chinese and the nacreous and gildedJapanese papers, the white Whatmans, the brown Hollands, thebuff-colored Turkeys and Seychal Mills, and equally disgusted with allmechanically manufactured sheets, he had ordered special laid paper inthe mould, from the old plants of Vire which still employ the pestlesonce in use to grind hemp. To introduce a certain variety into hiscollection, he had repeatedly brought from London prepared stuffs,paper interwoven with hairs, and as a mark of his disdain forbibliophiles, he had a Lubeck merchant prepare for him an improvedcandle paper of bottle-blue tint, clear and somewhat brittle, in thepulp of which the straw was replaced by golden spangles resemblingthose which dot Danzig brandy.

Under these circumstances he had succeeded in procuring unique books,adopting obsolete formats which he had bound by Lortic, byTrautz-Bauzonnet or Chambolle, by the successors of Cape, inirreproachable covers of old silk, stamped cow hide, Cape goat skin,in full bindings with compartments and in mosaic designs, protected bytabby or moire watered silk, ecclesiastically ornamented with claspsand corners, and sometimes even enamelled by Gruel Engelmann withsilver oxide and clear enamels.

Thus, with the marvelous episcopal lettering used in the old house ofLe Clere, he had Baudelaire's works printed in a large formatrecalling that of ancient missals, on a very light and spongy Japanpaper, soft as elder pith and imperceptibly tinted with a light rosehue through its milky white. This edition, limited to one copy,printed with a velvety black Chinese ink, had been covered outside andthen recovered within with a wonderful genuine sow skin, chosen amonga thousand, the color of flesh, its surface spotted where the hairshad been and adorned with black silk stamped in cold iron inmiraculous designs by a great artist.

That day, Des Esseintes took this incomparable book from his shelvesand handled it devotedly, once more reading certain pieces whichseemed to him, in this simple but inestimable frame, more thanordinarily penetrating.

His admiration for this writer was unqualified. According to him,until Baudelaire's advent in literature, writers had limitedthemselves to exploring the surfaces of the soul or to penetratinginto the accessible and illuminated caverns, restoring here and therethe layers of capital sins, studying their veins, their growths, andnoting, like Balzac for example, the layers of strata in the soulpossessed by the monomania of a passion, by ambition, by avarice, bypaternal stupidity, or by senile love.

What had been treated heretofore was the abundant health of virtuesand of vices, the tranquil functioning of commonplace brains, and thepractical reality of contemporary ideas, without any ideal of sicklydepravation or of any beyond. In short, the discoveries of thoseanalysts had stopped at the speculations of good or evil classified bythe Church. It was the simple investigation, the conventionalexamination of a botanist minutely observing the anticipateddevelopment of normal efflorescence abounding in the natural earth.

Baudelaire had gone farther. He had descended to the very bowels ofthe inexhaustible mine, had involved his mind in abandoned andunfamiliar levels, and come to those districts of the soul wheremonstrous vegetations of thought extend their branches.

There, near those confines, the haunt of aberrations and of sickness,of the mystic lockjaw, the warm fever of lust, and the typhoids andvomits of crime, he had found, brooding under the gloomy clock ofEnnui, the terrifying spectre of the age of sentiments and ideas.

He had revealed the morbid psychology of the mind which has attainedthe October of its sensations, recounted the symptoms of soulssummoned by grief and licensed by spleen, and shown the increasingdecay of impressions while the enthusiasms and beliefs of youth areenfeebled and the only thing remaining is the arid memory of miseriesborne, intolerances endured and affronts suffered by intelligencesoppressed by a ridiculous destiny.

He had pursued all the phases of that lamentable autumn, studying thehuman creature, quick to exasperation, ingenious in deceiving himself,compelling his thoughts to cheat each other so as to suffer the morekeenly, and frustrating in advance all possible joy by his faculty ofanalysis and observation.

Then, in this vexed sensibility of the soul, in this ferocity ofreflection that repels the restless ardor of devotions and thewell-meaning outrages of charity, he gradually saw arising the horrorof those senile passions, those ripe loves, where one person yieldswhile the other is still suspicious, where lassitude denies suchcouples the filial caresses whose apparent youthfulness seems new, andthe maternal candors whose gentleness and comfort impart, in a sense,the engaging remorse of a vague incest.

In magnificent pages he exposed his hybrid loves who were exasperatedby the impotence in which they were overwhelmed, the hazardous deceitsof narcotics and poisons invoked to aid in calming suffering andconquering ennui. At an epoch when literature attributed unhappinessof life almost exclusively to the mischances of unrequited love or tothe jealousies that attend adulterous love, he disregarded suchpuerile maladies and probed into those wounds which are more fatal,more keen and deep, which arise from satiety, disillusion and scorn inruined souls whom the present tortures, the past fills with loathingand the future frightens and menaces with despair.

And the more Des Esseintes read Baudelaire, the more he felt theineffable charm of this writer who, in an age when verse served onlyto portray the external semblance of beings and things, had succeededin expressing the inexpressible in a muscular and brawny language;who, more than any other writer possessed a marvelous power to definewith a strange robustness of expression, the most fugitive andtentative morbidities of exhausted minds and sad souls.

After Baudelaire's works, the number of French books given place inhis shelves was strictly limited. He was completely indifferent tothose works which it is fashionable to praise. "The broad laugh ofRabelais," and "the deep comedy of Moliere," did not succeed indiverting him, and the antipathy he felt against these farces was sogreat that he did not hesitate to liken them, in the point of art, tothe capers of circus clowns.

As for old poetry, he read hardly anything except Villon, whosemelancholy ballads touched him, and, here and there, certain fragmentsfrom d'Aubigne, which stimulated his blood with the incrediblevehemence of their apostrophes and curses.

In prose, he cared little for Voltaire and Rousseau, and was unmovedeven by Diderot, whose so greatly praised _Salons_ he found strangelysaturated with moralizing twaddle and futility; in his hatred towardall this balderdash, he limited himself almost exclusively to thereading of Christian eloquence, to the books of Bourdaloue and Bossuetwhose sonorously embellished periods were imposing; but, still more,he relished suggestive ideas condensed into severe and strong phrases,such as those created by Nicole in his reflections, and especiallyPascal, whose austere pessimism and attrition deeply touched him.

Apart from such books as these, French literature began in his librarywith the nineteenth century.

This section was divided into two groups, one of which included theordinary, secular literature, and the other the Catholic literature, aspecial but little known literature published by large publishinghouses and circulated to the four corners of the earth.

He had had the hardihood to explore such crypts as these, just as inthe secular art he had discovered, under an enormous mass of insipidwritings, a few books written by true masters.

The distinctive character of this literature was the constantimmutability of its ideas and language. Just as the Church perpetuatedthe primitive form of holy objects, so she has preserved the relics ofher dogmas, piously retaining, as the frame that encloses them, theoratorical language of the celebrated century. As one of the Church'sown writers, Ozanam, has put it, the Christian style needed only tomake use of the dialect employed by Bourdaloue and by Bossuet to theexclusion of all else.

In spite of this statement, the Church, more indulgent, closed itseyes to certain expressions, certain turns of style borrowed from thesecular language of the same century, and the Catholic idiom hadslightly purified itself of its heavy and massive phrases, especiallycleaning itself, in Bossuet, of its prolixity and the painful rallyingof its pronouns; but here ended the concessions, and others woulddoubtless have been purposeless for the prose sufficed without thisballast for the limited range of subjects to which the Church confineditself.

Incapable of grappling with contemporary life, of rendering the mostsimple aspects of things and persons visible and palpable, unqualifiedto explain the complicated wiles of intellects indifferent to thebenefits of salvation, this language was nevertheless excellent whenit treated of abstract subjects. It proved valuable in the argument ofcontroversy, in the demonstration of a theory, in the obscurity of acommentary and, more than any other style, had the necessary authorityto affirm, without any discussion, the intent of a doctrine.

Unfortunately, here as everywhere, the sanctuary had been invaded by anumerous army of pedants who smirched by their ignorance and lack oftalent the Church's noble and austere attire. Further to profane it,devout women had interfered, and stupid sacristans and foolish_salons_ had acclaimed as works of genius the wretched prattle of suchwomen.

Among such works, Des Esseintes had had the curiosity to read those ofMadame Swetchine, the Russian, whose house in Paris was the rendezvousof the most fervent Catholics. Her writings had filled him withinsufferably horrible boredom; they were more than merely wretched:they were wretched in every way, resembling the echoes of a tinychapel where the solemn worshippers mumble their prayers, asking newsof one another in low voices, while they repeat with a deeplymysterious air the common gossip of politics, weather forecasts andthe state of the weather.

But there was even worse: a female laureate licensed by the Institute,Madame Augustus Craven, author of _Recit d'une soeur_, of _Eliane_ and_Fleaurange_, puffed into reputation by the whole apostolic press.Never, no, never, had Des Esseintes imagined that any person couldwrite such ridiculous nonsense. In the point of conception, thesebooks were so absurd, and were written in such a disgusting style,that by these tokens they became almost remarkable and rare.

It was not at all among the works of women that Des Esseintes, whosesoul was completely jaded and whose nature was not inclined tosentimentality, could come upon a literary retreat suited to histaste.

Yet he strove, with a diligence that no impatience could overcome, toenjoy the works of a certain girl of genius, the blue-stocking pucelleof the group, but his efforts miscarried. He did not take to the_Journal_ and the _Lettres_ in which Eugenie de Guerin celebrates,without discretion, the amazing talent of a brother who rhymed, withsuch cleverness and grace that one must go to the works of de Jouy andEcouchard Lebrun to find anything so novel and daring.

He had also unavailingly attempted to comprehend the delights of thoseworks in which one may find such things as these:

This morning I hung on papa's bed a cross which a little girl had given him yesterday.

Or:

Mimi and I are invited by Monsieur Roquiers to attend the consecration of a bell tomorrow. This does not displease me at all.

Or wherein we find such important events as these:

On my neck I have hung a medal of the Holy Virgin which Louise had brought me, as an amulet against cholera.

Or poetry of this sort:

O the lovely moonbeam which fell on the Bible I was reading!

And, finally, such fine and penetrating observations as these:

When I see a man pass before a crucifix, lift his hat and make the sign of the Cross, I say to myself, 'There goes a Christian.'

And she continued in this fashion, without pause, until after Mauricede Guerin had died, after which his sister bewailed him in otherpages, written in a watery prose strewn here and there with bits ofpoems whose humiliating poverty ended by moving Des Esseintes to pity.

Ah! it was hardly worth mentioning, but the Catholic party was not atall particular in the choice of its proteges and not at all artistic.Without exception, all these writers wrote in the pallid white proseof pensioners of a monastery, in a flowing movement of phrase which noastringent could counterbalance.

So Des Esseintes, horror-stricken at such insipidities, entirelyforsook this literature. But neither did he find atonement for hisdisappointments among the modern masters of the clergy. These latterwere one-sided divines or impeccably correct controversialists, butthe Christian language in their orations and books had ended bybecoming impersonal and congealing into a rhetoric whose everymovement and pause was anticipated, in a sequence of periodsconstructed after a single model. And, in fact, Des Esseintesdiscovered that all the ecclesiastics wrote in the same manner, with alittle more or a little less abandon or emphasis, and there was seldomany variations between the bodiless patterns traded by Dupanloup orLandriot, La Bouillerie or Gaume, by Dom Gueranger or Ratisbonne, byFreppel or Perraud, by Ravignan or Gratry, by Olivain or Dosithee, byDidon or Chocarne.

Des Esseintes had often pondered upon this matter. A really authentictalent, a supremely profound originality, a well-anchored conviction,he thought, was needed to animate this formal style which was toofrail to support any thought that was unforseen or any thesis that wasaudacious.

Yet, despite all this, there were several writers whose burningeloquence fused and shaped this language, notably Lacordaire, who wasone of the few really great writers the Church had produced for manyyears.

Immured, like his colleagues, in the narrow circle of orthodoxspeculations, likewise obliged to dissipate his energies in theexclusive consideration of those theories which had been expressed andconsecrated by the Fathers of the Church and developed by the mastersof the pulpit, he succeeded in inbuing them with novelty and inrejuvenating, almost in modifying them, by clothing them in a morepersonal and stimulating form. Here and there in his _Conferences deNotre-Dame_, were treasures of expression, audacious usages of words,accents of love, rapid movements, cries of joy and distractedeffusions. Then, to his position as a brilliant and gentle monk whoseingenuity and labors had been exhausted in the impossible task ofconciliating the liberal doctrines of society with the authoritariandogmas of the Church, he added a temperament of fierce love and suavediplomatic tenderness. In his letters to young men may be found thecaressing inflections of a father exhorting his sons with smilingreprimands, the well-meaning advice and the indulgent forgiveness.Some of these Des Esseintes found charming, confessing as they did themonk's yearning for affection, while others were even imposing whenthey sought to sustain courage and dissipate doubts by the inimitablecertainties of Faith. In fine, this sentiment of paternity, which gavehis pen a delicately feminine quality, lent to his prose acharacteristically individual accent discernible among all theclerical literature.

After Lacordaire, ecclesiastics and monks possessing any individualitywere extremely rare. At the very most, a few pages of his pupil, theAbbe Peyreyve, merited reading. He left sympathetic biographies of hismaster, wrote a few loveable letters, composed treatises in thesonorous language of formal discourse, and delivered panegyrics inwhich the declamatory tone was too broadly stressed. Certainly theAbbe Peyreyve had neither the emotion nor the ardor of Lacordaire. Hewas too much a priest and too little a man. Yet, here and there in therhetoric of his sermons, flashed interesting effects of large andsolid phrasing or touches of nobility that were almost venerable.

But to find writers of prose whose works justify close study, one wasobliged to seek those who had not submitted to Ordination; to thesecular writers whom the interests of Catholicism engaged and devotedto its cause.

With the Comte de Falloux, the episcopal style, so stupidly handled bythe prelates, recruited new strength and in a manner recovered itsmasculine vigor. Under his guise of moderation, this academicianexuded gall. The discourse which he delivered to Parliament in 1848was diffuse and abject, but his articles, first printed in the_Correspondant_ and since collected into books, were mordant anddiscerning under the exaggerated politeness of their form. Conceivedas harangues, they contained a certain strong muscular energy and wereastonishing in the intolerance of their convictions.

A dangerous polemist because of his ambuscades, a shrewd logician,executing flanking movements and attacking unexpectedly, the Comte deFalloux had also written striking, penetrating pages on the death ofMadame Swetchine, whose tracts he had collected and whom he revered asa saint.

But the true temperament of the writer was betrayed in the twobrochures which appeared in 1848 and 1880, the latter entitled_l'Unite nationale_.

Moved by a cold rage, the implacable legitimist this time foughtopenly, contrary to his custom, and hurled against the infidels, inthe form of a peroration, such fulminating invectives as these:

"And you, systematic Utopians, who make an abstraction of humannature, fomentors of atheism, fed on chimerae and hatreds,emancipators of woman, destroyers of the family, genealogists of thesimian race, you whose name was but lately an outrage, be satisfied:you shall have been the prophets, and your disciples will be thehigh-priests of an abominable future!"

The other brochure bore the title _le Parti catholique_ and wasdirected against the despotism of the _Univers_ and against Veuillotwhose name he refused to mention. Here the sinuous attacks wereresumed, venom filtered beneath each line, when the gentleman, clad inblue answered the sharp physical blows of the fighter with scornfulsarcasms.

These contestants represented the two parties of the Church, the twofactions whose differences were resolved into virulent hatreds. DeFalloux, the more haughty and cunning, belonged to the liberal campwhich already claimed Montalembert and Cochin, Lacordaire and DeBroglie. He subscribed to the principles of the _Correspondant_, areview which attempted to cover the imperious theories of the Churchwith a varnish of tolerance. Veuillot, franker and more open, scornedsuch masks, unhesitatingly admitted the tyranny of the ultramontainedoctrines and confessed, with a certain compunction, the pitiless yokeof the Church's dogma.

For the conduct of this verbal warfare, Veuillot had made himselfmaster of a special style, partly borrowed from La Bruyere and DuGros-Caillou. This half-solemn, half-slang style, had the force of atomahawk in the hands of this vehement personality. Strangelyheadstrong and brave, he had overwhelmed both free thinkers andbishops with this terrible weapon, charging at his enemies like abull, regardless of the party to which they belonged. Distrusted bythe Church, which would tolerate neither his contraband style nor hisfortified theories, he had nevertheless overawed everybody by hispowerful talent, incurring the attack of the entire press which heeffectively thrashed in his _Odeurs de Paris_, coping with everyassault, freeing himself with a kick of the foot of all the wretchedhack-writers who had presumed to attack him.

Unfortunately, this undisputed talent only existed in pugilism. Atpeace, Veuillot was no more than a mediocre writer. His poetry andnovels were pitiful. His language was vapid, when it was not engagedin a striking controversy. In repose, he changed, uttering banallitanies and mumbling childish hymns.

More formal, more constrained and more serious was the belovedapologist of the Church, Ozanam, the inquisitor of the Christianlanguage. Although he was very difficult to understand, Des Esseintesnever failed to be astonished by the insouciance of this writer, whospoke confidently of God's impenetrable designs, although he feltobliged to establish proof of the improbable assertions he advanced.With the utmost self-confidence, he deformed events, contradicted,with greater impudence even than the panegyrists of other parties, theknown facts of history, averred that the Church had never concealedthe esteem it had for science, called heresies impure miasmas, andtreated Buddhism and other religions with such contempt that heapologized for even soiling his Catholic prose by onslaught on theirdoctrines.

At times, religious passion breathed a certain ardor into hisoratorical language, under the ice of which seethed a violent current;in his numerous writings on Dante, on Saint Francis, on the author of_Stabat Mater_, on the Franciscan poets, on socialism, on commerciallaw and every imaginable subject, this man pleaded for the defense ofthe Vatican which he held indefectible, and judged causes and opinionsaccording to their harmony or discord with those that he advanced.

This manner of viewing questions from a single viewpoint was also themethod of that literary scamp, Nettement, whom some people would havemade the other's rival. The latter was less bigoted than the master,affected less arrogance and admitted more worldly pretentions. Herepeatedly left the literary cloister in which Ozanam had imprisonedhimself, and had read secular works so as to be able to judge of them.This province he entered gropingly, like a child in a vault, seeingnothing but shadow around him, perceiving in this gloom only the gleamof the candle which illumed the place a few paces before him.

In this gloom, uncertain of his bearings, he stumbled at every turn,speaking of Murger who had "the care of a chiselled and carefullyfinished style"; of Hugo who sought the noisome and unclean and towhom he dared compare De Laprade; of Paul Delacroix who scorned therules; of Paul Delaroche and of the poet Reboul, whom he praisedbecause of their apparent faith.

Des Esseintes could not restrain a shrug of the shoulders before thesestupid opinions, covered by a borrowed prose whose already worntexture clung or became torn at each phrase.

In a different way, the works of Poujoulat and Genoude, Montalembert,Nicolas and Carne failed to inspire him with any definite interest.His taste for history was not pronounced, even when treated with thescholarly fidelity and harmonious style of the Duc de Broglie, nor washis penchant for the social and religious questions, even whenbroached by Henry Cochin, who revealed his true self in a letter wherehe gave a stirring account of the taking of the veil at theSacre-Coeur. He had not touched these books for a long time, and theperiod was already remote when he had thrown with his waste paper thepuerile lucubrations of the gloomy Pontmartin and the pitiful Feval;and long since he had given to his servants, for a certain vulgarusage, the short stories of Aubineau and Lasserre, in which arerecorded wretched hagiographies of miracles effected by Dupont ofTours and by the Virgin.

In no way did Des Esseintes derive even a fugitive distraction fromhis boredom from this literature. The mass of books which he had oncestudied he had thrown into dim corners of his library shelves when heleft the Fathers' school. "I should have left them in Paris," he toldhimself, as he turned out some books which were particularlyinsufferable: those of the Abbe Lamennais and that impervioussectarian so magisterially, so pompously dull and empty, the ComteJoseph de Maistre.

A single volume remained on a shelf, within reach of his hand. It wasthe _Homme_ of Ernest Hello. This writer was the absolute opposite ofhis religious confederates. Almost isolated among the pious groupterrified by his conduct, Ernest Hello had ended by abandoning theopen road that led from earth to heaven. Probably disgusted by thedullness of the journey and the noisy mob of those pilgrims of letterswho for centuries followed one after the other upon the same highway,marching in each other's steps, stopping at the same places toexchange the same commonplace remarks on religion, on the ChurchFathers, on their similar beliefs, on their common masters, he haddeparted through the byways to wander in the gloomy glade of Pascal,where he tarried long to recover his breath before continuing on hisway and going even farther in the regions of human thought than theJansenist, whom he derided.

Tortuous and precious, doctoral and complex, Hello, by the piercingcunning of his analysis, recalled to Des Esseintes the sharp, probinginvestigations of some of the infidel psychologists of the precedingand present century. In him was a sort of Catholic Duranty, but moredogmatic and penetrating, an experienced manipulation of themagnifying glass, a sophisticated engineer of the soul, a skillfulwatchmaker of the brain, delighting to examine the mechanism of apassion and elucidate it by details of the wheel work.

In this oddly formed mind existed unsurmised relationships ofthoughts, harmonies and oppositions; furthermore, he affected a whollynovel manner of action which used the etymology of words as aspring-board for ideas whose associations sometimes became tenuous,but which almost constantly remained ingenious and sparkling.

Thus, despite the awkwardness of his structure, he dissected with asingular perspicacity, the _Avare_, "the ordinary man," and "thepassion of unhappiness," revealing meanwhile interesting comparisonswhich could be constructed between the operations of photography andof memory.

But such skill in handling this perfected instrument of analysis,stolen from the enemies of the Church, represented only one of thetemperamental phases of this man.

Still another existed. This mind divided itself in two parts andrevealed, besides the writer, the religious fanatic and Biblicalprophet.

Like Hugo, whom he now and again recalled in distortions of phrasesand words, Ernest Hello had delighted in imitating Saint John ofPatmos. He pontificated and vaticinated from his retreat in the rueSaint-Sulpice, haranguing the reader with an apocalyptic languagepartaking in spots of the bitterness of an Isaiah.

He affected inordinate pretentions of profundity. There were somefawning and complacent people who pretended to consider him a greatman, the reservoir of learning, the encyclopedic giant of the age.Perhaps he was a well, but one at whose bottom one often could notfind a drop of water.

In his volume _Paroles de Dieu_, he paraphrased the Holy Scriptures,endeavoring to complicate their ordinarily obvious sense. In his otherbook _Homme_, and in his brochure _le Jour du Seigneur_, written in abiblical style, rugged and obscure, he sought to appear like avengeful apostle, prideful and tormented with spleen, but showedhimself a deacon touched with a mystic epilepsy, or like a talentedMaistre, a surly and bitter sectarian.

But, thought Des Esseintes, this sickly shamelessness often obstructedthe inventive sallies of the casuist. With more intolerance than evenOzanam, he resolutely denied all that pertained to his clan,proclaimed the most disconcerting axioms, maintained with adisconcerting authority that "geology is returning toward Moses," andthat natural history, like chemistry and every contemporary science,verifies the scientific truth of the Bible. The proposition on eachpage was of the unique truth and the superhuman knowledge of theChurch, and everywhere were interspersed more than perilous aphorismsand raging curses cast at the art of the last century.

To this strange mixture was added the love of sanctimonious delights,such as a translation of the _Visions_ by Angele de Foligno, a book ofan unparalleled fluid stupidity, with selected works of Jean Rusbrockl'Admirable, a mystic of the thirteenth century whose prose offered anincomprehensible but alluring combination of dusky exaltations,caressing effusions, and poignant transports.

The whole attitude of this presumptuous pontiff, Hello, had leapedfrom a preface written for this book. He himself remarked that"extraordinary things can only be stammered," and he stammered in goodtruth, declaring that "the holy gloom where Rusbrock extends his eaglewings is his ocean, his prey, his glory, and for such as him the farhorizons would be a too narrow garment."

However this might be, Des Esseintes felt himself intrigued towardthis ill-balanced but subtile mind. No fusion had been effectedbetween the skilful psychologist and the pious pedant, and the veryjolts and incoherencies constituted the personality of the man.

With him was recruited the little group of writers who fought on thefront battle line of the clerical camp. They did not belong to theregular army, but were more properly the scouts of a religion whichdistrusted men of such talent as Veuillot and Hello, because they didnot seem sufficiently submissive and shallow. What the Church reallydesires is soldiers who do not reason, files of such blind combatantsand such mediocrities as Hello describes with the rage of one who hassubmitted to their yoke. Thus it was that Catholicism had lost no timein driving away one of its partisans, an enraged pamphleteer who wrotein a style at once rare and exasperated, the savage Leon Bloy; andcaused to be cast from the doors of its bookshops, as it would aplague or a filthy vagrant, another writer who had made himself hoarsewith celebrating its praises, Barbey d'Aurevilly.

It is true that the latter was too prone to compromise and notsufficiently docile. Others bent their heads under rebukes andreturned to the ranks; but he was the _enfant terrible_, and wasunrecognized by the party. In a literary way, he pursued women whom hedragged into the sanctuary. Nay, even that vast disdain was invoked,with which Catholicism enshrouds talent to prevent excommunicationfrom putting beyond the pale of the law a perplexing servant who,under pretext of honoring his masters, broke the window panes of thechapel, juggled with the holy pyxes and executed eccentric dancesaround the tabernacle.

Two works of Barbey d'Aurevilly specially attracted Des Esseintes, the_Pretre marie_ and the _Diaboliques_. Others, such as the _Ensorcele_,the _Chevalier des touches_ and _Une Vieille Maitresse_, werecertainly more comprehensive and more finely balanced, but they leftDes Esseintes untouched, for he was really interested only inunhealthy works which were consumed and irritated by fever.

In these all but healthy volumes, Barbey d'Aurevilly constantlyhesitated between those two pits which the Catholic religion succeedsin reconciling: mysticism and sadism.

In these two books which Des Esseintes was thumbing, Barbey had lostall prudence, given full rein to his steed, and galloped at full speedover roads to their farthest limits.

All the mysterious horror of the Middle Ages hovered over thatimprobable book, the _Pretre marie_; magic blended with religion,black magic with prayer and, more pitiless and savage than the Devilhimself, the God of Original Sin incessantly tortured the innocentCalixte, His reprobate, as once He had caused one of his angels tomark the houses of unbelievers whom he wished to slay.

Conceived by a fasting monk in the grip of delirium, these scenes wereunfolded in the uneven style of a tortured soul. Unfortunately, amongthose disordered creatures that were like galvanized Coppelias ofHoffmann, some, like Neel de Nehou, seemed to have been imagined inmoments of exhaustion following convulsions, and were discordant notesin this harmony of sombre madness, where they were as comical andridiculous as a tiny zinc figure playing on a horn on a timepiece.

After these mystic divagations, the writer had experienced a period ofcalm. Then a terrible relapse followed.

This belief that man is a Buridanesque donkey, a being balancedbetween two forces of equal attraction which successively remainvictorious and vanquished, this conviction that human life is only anuncertain combat waged between hell and heaven, this faith in twoopposite beings, Satan and Christ, was fatally certain to engendersuch inner discords of the soul, exalted by incessant struggle,excited at once by promises and menaces, and ending by abandoningitself to whichever of the two forces persisted in the pursuit themore relentlessly.

In the _Pretre marie_, Barbey d'Aurevilly sang the praises of Christ,who had prevailed against temptations; in the _Diaboliques_, theauthor succumbed to the Devil, whom he celebrated; then appearedsadism, that bastard of Catholicism, which through the centuriesreligion has relentlessly pursued with its exorcisms and stakes.

This condition, at once fascinating and ambiguous, can not arise inthe soul of an unbeliever. It does not merely consist in sinkingoneself in the excesses of the flesh, excited by outrageousblasphemies, for in such a case it would be no more than a case ofsatyriasis that had reached its climax. Before all, it consists insacrilegious practice, in moral rebellion, in spiritual debauchery, ina wholly ideal aberration, and in this it is exemplarily Christian. Italso is founded upon a joy tempered by fear, a joy analogous to thesatisfaction of children who disobey their parents and play withforbidden things, for no reason other than that they had beenforbidden to do so.

In fact, if it did not admit of sacrilege, sadism would have no reasonfor existence. Besides, the sacrilege proceeding from the veryexistence of a religion, can only be intentionally and pertinentlyperformed by a believer, for no one would take pleasure in profaning afaith that was indifferent or unknown to him.

The power of sadism and the attraction it presents, lies entirely thenin the prohibited enjoyment of transferring to Satan the praises andprayers due to God; it lies in the non-observance of Catholic preceptswhich one really follows unwillingly, by committing in deeper scorn ofChrist, those sins which the Church has especially cursed, such aspollution of worship and carnal orgy.

In its elements, this phenomenon to which the Marquis de Sade hasbequeathed his name is as old as the Church. It had reared its head inthe eighteenth century, recalling, to go back no farther, by a simplephenomenon of atavism the impious practices of the Sabbath, thewitches' revels of the Middle Ages.

By having consulted the _Malleus maleficorum_, that terrible code ofJacob Sprenger which permits the Church wholesale burnings ofnecromancers and sorcerers, Des Esseintes recognized in the witches'Sabbath, all the obscene practices and all the blasphemies of sadism.In addition to the unclean scenes beloved by Malin, the nightssuccessively and lawfully consecrated to excessive sensual orgies anddevoted to the bestialities of passion, he once more discovered theparody of the processions, the insults and eternal threats levelled atGod and the devotion bestowed upon His rival, while amid cursing ofthe wine and the bread, the black mass was being celebrated on theback of a woman on all fours, whose stained bare thighs served as thealtar from which the congregation received the communion from a blackgoblet stamped with an image of a goat.

This profusion of impure mockeries and foul shames were marked in thecareer of the Marquis de Sade, who garnished his terrible pleasureswith outrageous sacrileges.

He cried out to the sky, invoked Lucifer, shouted his contempt of God,calling Him rogue and imbecile, spat upon the communion, endeavored tocontaminate with vile ordures a Divinity who he prayed might damn him,the while he declared, to defy Him the more, that He did not exist.

Barbey d'Aurevilly approached this psychic state. If he did notpresume as far as De Sade in uttering atrocious curses against theSaviour; if, more prudent or more timid, he claimed ever to honor theChurch, he none the less addressed his suit to the Devil as was donein medieval times and he, too, in order to brave God, fell intodemoniac nymphomania, inventing sensual monstrosities, even borrowingfrom bedroom philosophy a certain episode which he seasoned with newcondiments when he wrote the story _le Diner d'un athee_.

This extravagant book pleased Des Esseintes. He had caused to beprinted, in violet ink and in a frame of cardinal purple, on a genuineparchment which the judges of the Rota had blessed, a copy of the_Diaboliques_, with characters whose quaint quavers and flourishes inturned up tails and claws affected a satanic form.

After certain pieces of Baudelaire that, in imitation of the clamoroussongs of nocturnal revels, celebrated infernal litanies, this volumealone of all the works of contemporary apostolic literature testifiedto this state of mind, at once impious and devout, toward whichCatholicism often thrust Des Esseintes.

With Barbey d'Aurevilly ended the line of religious writers; and intruth, that pariah belonged more, from every point of view, to secularliterature than to the other with which he demanded a place that wasdenied him. His language was the language of disheveled romanticism,full of involved expressions, unfamiliar turns of speech, delightedwith extravagant comparisons and with whip strokes and phrases whichexploded, like the clangor of noisy bells, along the text. In short,d'Aurevilly was like a stallion among the geldings of theultramontaine stables.

Des Esseintes reflected in this wise while re-reading, here and there,several passages of the book and, comparing its nervous and changingstyle with the fixed manner of other Church writers, he thought of theevolution of language which Darwin has so truly revealed.

Compelled to live in a secular atmosphere, raised in the heart of theromantic school, constantly being in the current of modern literatureand accustomed to reading contemporary publications, Barbeyd'Aurevilly had acquired a dialect which although it had sustainednumerous and profound changes since the Great Age, had neverthelessrenewed itself in his works.

The ecclesiastical writers, on the contrary, confined within specificlimitations, restricted to ancient Church literature, knowing nothingof the literary progress of the centuries and determined if need be toblind their eyes the more surely not to see, necessarily wereconstrained to the use of an inflexible language, like that of theeighteenth century which descendants of the French who settled inCanada still speak and write today, without change of phrasing orwords, having succeeded in preserving their original idiom byisolation in certain metropolitan centres, despite the fact that theyare enveloped upon every side by English-speaking peoples.

Meanwhile the silvery sound of a clock that tolled the angelusannounced breakfast time to Des Esseintes. He abandoned his books,pressed his brow and went to the dining room, saying to himself that,among all the volumes he had just arranged, the works of Barbeyd'Aurevilly were the only ones whose ideas and style offered thegaminess he so loved to savor in the Latin and decadent, monasticwriters of past ages.

Chapter 13

As the season advanced, the weather, far from improving, grew worse.Everything seemed to go wrong that year. After the squalls and mists,the sky was covered with a white expanse of heat, like plates of sheetiron. In two days, without transition, a torrid heat, an atmosphere offrightful heaviness, succeeded the damp cold of foggy days and thestreaming of the rains. As though stirred by furious pokers, the sunshowed like a kiln-hole, darting a light almost white-hot, burningone's face. A hot dust rose from the roads, scorching the dry trees,and the yellowed lawns became a deep brown. A temperature like that ofa foundry hung over the dwelling of Des Esseintes.

Half naked, he opened a window and received the air like a furnaceblast in his face. The dining room, to which he fled, was fiery, andthe rarefied air simmered. Utterly distressed, he sat down, for thestimulation that had seized him had ended since the close of hisreveries.

Like all people tormented by nervousness, heat distracted him. And hisanaemia, checked by cold weather, again became pronounced, weakeninghis body which had been debilitated by copious perspiration.

The back of his shirt was saturated, his perinaeum was damp, his feetand arms moist, his brow overflowing with sweat that ran down hischeeks. Des Esseintes reclined, annihilated, on a chair.

The sight of the meat placed on the table at that moment caused hisstomach to rise. He ordered the food removed, asked for boiled eggs,and tried to swallow some bread soaked in eggs, but his stomach wouldhave none of it. A fit of nausea overcame him. He drank a few drops ofwine that pricked his stomach like points of fire. He wet his face;the perspiration, alternately warm and cold, coursed along histemples. He began to suck some pieces of ice to overcome his troubledheart--but in vain.

So weak was he that he leaned against the table. He rose, feeling theneed of air, but the bread had slowly risen in his gullet and remainedthere. Never had he felt so distressed, so shattered, so ill at ease.To add to his discomfort, his eyes distressed him and he saw objectsin double. Soon he lost his sense of distance, and his glass seemed tobe a league away. He told himself that he was the play-thing ofsensorial illusions and that he was incapable of reacting. Hestretched out on a couch, but instantly he was cradled as by thetossing of a moving ship, and the affection of his heart increased. Herose to his feet, determined to rid himself, by means of a digestive,of the food which was choking him.

He again reached the dining room and sadly compared himself, in thiscabin, to passengers seized with sea-sickness. Stumbling, he made hisway to the closet, examined the mouth organ without opening any of thestops, but instead took from a high shelf a bottle of benedictinewhich he kept because of its form which to him seemed suggestive ofthoughts that were at once gently wanton and vaguely mystic.

But at this moment he remained indifferent, gazing with lack-lustre,staring eyes at this squat, dark-green bottle which, at other times,had brought before him images of the medieval priories by itsold-fashioned monkish paunch, its head and neck covered with aparchment hood, its red wax stamp quartered with three silver mitresagainst a field of azure and fastened at the neck, like a papal bull,with bands of lead, its label inscribed in sonorous Latin, on paperthat seemed to have yellowed with age: _Liquor MonachorumBenedictinorum Abbatiae Fiscannensis_.

Under this thoroughly abbatial robe, signed with a cross and theecclesiastic initials 'D.O.M.', pressed in between its parchments andligatures, slept an exquisitely fine saffron-colored liquid. Itbreathed an aroma that seemed the quintessence of angelica and hyssopblended with sea-weeds and of iodines and bromes hidden in sweetessences, and it stimulated the palate with a spiritous ardorconcealed under a virginal daintiness, and charmed the sense of smellby a pungency enveloped in a caress innocent and devout.

This deceit which resulted from the extraordinary disharmony betweencontents and container, between the liturgic form of the flask and itsso feminine and modern soul, had formerly stimulated Des Esseintes torevery and, facing the bottle, he was inclined to think at greatlength of the monks who sold it, the Benedictines of the Abbey ofFecamp who, belonging to the brotherhood of Saint-Maur which had beencelebrated for its controversial works under the rule of Saint Benoit,followed neither the observances of the white monks of Citeaux nor ofthe black monks of Cluny. He could not but think of them as being liketheir brethren of the Middle Ages, cultivating simples, heatingretorts and distilling faultless panaceas and prescriptions.

He tasted a drop of this liquor and, for a few moments, had relief.But soon the fire, which the dash of wine had lit in his bowels,revived. He threw down his napkin, returned to his study, and pacedthe floor. He felt as if he were under a pneumatic clock, and anumbing weakness stole from his brain through his limbs. Unable toendure it longer, he betook himself to the garden. It was the firsttime he had done this since his arrival at Fontenay. There he foundshelter beneath a tree which radiated a circle of shadow. Seated onthe lawn, he looked around with a besotted air at the square beds ofvegetables planted by the servants. He gazed, but it was only at theend of an hour that he really saw them, for a greenish film floatedbefore his eyes, permitting him only to see, as in the depths ofwater, flickering images of shifting tones.

But when he recovered his balance, he clearly distinguished the onionsand cabbages, a garden bed of lettuce further off, and, in thedistance along the hedge, a row of white lillies recumbent in theheavy air.

A smile played on his lips, for he suddenly recalled the strangecomparison of old Nicandre, who likened, in the point of form, thepistils of lillies to the genital organs of a donkey; and he recalledalso a passage from Albert le Grand, in which that thaumaturgistdescribes a strange way of discovering whether a girl is still avirgin, by means of a lettuce.

These remembrances distracted him somewhat. He examined the garden,interesting himself in the plants withered by the heat, and in the hotground whose vapors rose into the dusty air. Then, above the hedgewhich separated the garden below from the embankment leading to thefort, he watched the urchins struggling and tumbling on the ground.

He was concentrating his attention upon them when another younger,sorry little specimen appeared. He had hair like seaweed covered withsand, two green bubbles beneath his nose, and disgusting lipssurrounded by a dirty white frame formed by a slice of bread smearedwith cheese and filled with pieces of scallions.

Des Esseintes inhaled the air. A perverse appetite seized him. Thisdirty slice made his mouth water. It seemed to him that his stomach,refusing all other nourishment, could digest this shocking food, andthat his palate would enjoy it as though it were a feast.

He leaped up, ran to the kitchen and ordered a loaf, white cheese andgreen onions to be brought from the village, emphasizing his desirefor a slice exactly like the one being eaten by the child. Then hereturned to sit beneath the tree.

The little chaps were fighting with one another. They struggled forbits of bread which they shoved into their cheeks, meanwhile suckingtheir fingers. Kicks and blows rained freely, and the weakest,trampled upon, cried out.

At this sight, Des Esseintes recovered his animation. The interest hetook in this fight distracted his thoughts from his illness.Contemplating the blind fury of these urchins, he thought of the crueland abominable law of the struggle of existence; and, although thesechildren were mean, he could not help being interested in theirfutures, yet could not but believe that it had been better for themhad their mothers never given them birth.

In fact, all they could expect of life was rash, colic, fever, andmeasles in their earliest years; slaps in the face and degradingdrudgeries up to thirteen years; deceptions by women, sicknesses andinfidelity during manhood and, toward the last, infirmities andagonies in a poorhouse or asylum.

And the future was the same for every one, and none in his good sensescould envy his neighbor. The rich had the same passions, the sameanxieties, the same pains and the same illnesses, but in a differentenvironment; the same mediocre enjoyments, whether alcoholic, literaryor carnal. There was even a vague compensation in evils, a sort ofjustice which re-established the balance of misfortune between theclasses, permitting the poor to bear physical suffering more easily,and making it difficult for the unresisting, weaker bodies of the richto withstand it.

How vain, silly and mad it is to beget brats! And Des Esseintesthought of those ecclesiastics who had taken vows of sterility, yetwere so inconsistent as to canonize Saint Vincent de Paul, because hebrought vain tortures to innocent creatures.

By means of his hateful precautions, Vincent de Paul had deferred foryears the death of unintelligent and insensate beings, in such a waythat when they later became almost intelligent and sentient to grief,they were able to anticipate the future, to await and fear that deathof whose very name they had of late been ignorant, some of them goingas far to invoke it, in hatred of that sentence of life which the monkinflicted upon them by an absurd theological code.

And since this old man's death, his ideas had prevailed. Abandonedchildren were sheltered instead of being killed and yet their livesdaily became increasingly rigorous and barren! Then, under pretext ofliberty and progress, Society had discovered another means ofincreasing man's miseries by tearing him from his home, forcing him todon a ridiculous uniform and carry weapons, by brutalizing him in aslavery in every respect like that from which he had compassionatelyfreed the negro, and all to enable him to slaughter his neighborwithout risking the scaffold like ordinary murderers who operatesingle-handed, without uniforms and with weapons that are less swiftand deafening.

Des Esseintes wondered if there had ever been such a time as ours. Ourage invokes the causes of humanity, endeavors to perfect anaesthesiato suppress physical suffering. Yet at the same time it prepares thesevery stimulants to increase moral wretchedness.

Ah! if ever this useless procreation should be abolished, it were now.But here, again, the laws enacted by men like Portalis and Homaisappeared strange and cruel.

In the matter of generation, Justice finds the agencies for deceptionto be quite natural. It is a recognized and acknowledged fact. Thereis scarcely a home of any station that does not confide its childrento the drain pipes, or that does not employ contrivances that arefreely sold, and which it would enter no person's mind to prohibit.And yet, if these subterfuges proved insufficient, if the attemptmiscarried and if, to remedy matters, one had recourse to moreefficacious measures, ah! then there were not prisons enough, notmunicipal jails enough to confine those who, in good faith, werecondemned by other individuals who had that very evening, on theconjugal bed, done their utmost to avoid giving birth to children.

The deceit itself was not a crime, it seemed. The crime lay in thejustification of the deceit.

What Society considered a crime was the act of killing a being endowedwith life; and yet, in expelling a foetus, one destroyed an animalthat was less formed and living and certainly less intelligent andmore ugly than a dog or a cat, although it is permissible to stranglethese creatures as soon as they are born.

It is only right to add, for the sake of fairness, thought DesEsseintes, that it is not the awkward man, who generally loses no timein disappearing, but rather the woman, the victim of his stupidity,who expiates the crime of having saved an innocent life.

Yet was it right that the world should be filled with such prejudiceas to wish to repress manoeuvres so natural that primitive man, thePolynesian savage, for instance, instinctively practices them?

The servant interrupted the charitable reflections of Des Esseintes,who received the slice of bread on a plate of vermeil. Pains shotthrough his heart. He did not have the courage to eat this bread, forthe unhealthy excitement of his stomach had ceased. A sensation offrightful decay swept upon him. He was compelled to rise. The sunturned, and slowly fell upon the place that he had lately occupied.The heat became more heavy and fierce.

"Throw this slice of bread to those children who are murdering eachother on the road," he ordered his servant. "Let the weakest becrippled, be denied share in the prize, and be soundly thrashed intothe bargain, as they will be when they return to their homes with torntrousers and bruised eyes. This will give them an idea of the lifethat awaits them!"

And he entered the house and sank into his armchair.

"But I must try to eat something," he said. And he attempted to soak abiscuit in old Constantia wine, several bottles of which remained inhis cellar.

That wine, the color of slightly burned onions, partaking of Malagaand Port, but with a specially luscious flavor, and an after-taste ofgrapes dried by fiery suns, had often comforted him, given a newenergy to his stomach weakened by the fasts which he was forced toundergo. But this cordial, usually so efficacious, now failed. Then hethought that an emollient might perhaps counteract the fiery painswhich were consuming him, and he took out the Nalifka, a Russianliqueur, contained in a bottle frosted with unpolished glass. Thisunctuous raspberry-flavored syrup also failed. Alas! the time was faroff when, enjoying good health, Des Esseintes had ridden to his housein the hot summer days in a sleigh, and there, covered with furswrapped about his chest, forced himself to shiver, saying, as helistened attentively to the chattering of his teeth: "Ah, how bitingthis wind is! It is freezing!" Thus he had almost succeeded inconvincing himself that it was cold.

Unfortunately, such remedies as these had failed of their purpose eversince his sickness became vital.

With all this, he was unable to make use of laudanum: instead ofallaying the pain, this sedative irritated him even to the degree ofdepriving him of rest. At one time he had endeavored to procurevisions through opium and hashish, but these two substances had led tovomitings and intense nervous disturbances. He had instantly beenforced to give up the idea of taking them, and without the aid ofthese coarse stimulants, demand of his brain alone to transport himinto the land of dreams, far, far from life.

"What a day!" he said to himself, sponging his neck, feeling everyounce of his strength dissolve in perspiration; a feverish agitationstill prevented him from remaining in one spot; once more he walked upand down, trying every chair in the room in turn. Wearied of thestruggle, at last he fell against his bureau and leaning mechanicallyagainst the table, without thinking of anything, he touched anastrolabe which rested on a mass of books and notes and served as apaper weight.

He had purchased this engraved and gilded copper instrument (it hadcome from Germany and dated from the seventeenth century) of asecond-hand Paris dealer, after a visit to the Cluny Museum, where hehad stood for a long while in ecstatic admiration before a marvelousastrolabe made of chiseled ivory, whose cabalistic appearanceenchanted him.

This paper weight evoked many reminiscences within him. Aroused andactuated by the appearance of this trinket, his thoughts rushed fromFontenay to Paris, to the curio shop where he had purchased it, thenreturned to the Museum, and he mentally beheld the ivory astrolabe,while his unseeing eyes continued to gaze upon the copper astrolabe onthe table.

Then he left the Museum and, without quitting the town, strolled downthe streets, wandered through the rue du Sommerard and the boulevardSaint-Michel, branched off into the neighboring streets, and pausedbefore certain shops whose quite extraordinary appearance andprofusion had often attracted him.

Beginning with an astrolabe, this spiritual jaunt ended in the cafesof the Latin Quarter.

He remembered how these places were crowded in the rueMonsieur-le-Prince and at the end of the rue de Vaugirard, touchingthe Odeon; sometimes they followed one another like the old _riddecks_of the Canal-aux-Harengs, at Antwerp, each of which revealed a front,the counterpart of its neighbor.

Through the half-opened doors and the windows dimmed with coloredpanes or curtains, he had often seen women who walked about likegeese; others, on benches, rested their elbows on the marble tables,humming, their temples resting between their hands; still othersstrutted and posed in front of mirrors, playing with their false hairpomaded by hair-dressers; others, again, took money from their pursesand methodically sorted the different denominations in little heaps.

Most of them had heavy features, hoarse voices, flabby necks andpainted eyes; and all of them, like automatons, moved simultaneouslyupon the same impulse, flung the same enticements with the same toneand uttered the identical queer words, the same odd inflections andthe same smile.

Certain ideas associated themselves in the mind of Des Esseintes,whose reveries came to an end, now that he recalled this collection ofcoffee-houses and streets.

He understood the significance of those cafes which reflected thestate of soul of an entire generation, and from it he discovered thesynthesis of the period.

And, in fact, the symptoms were certain and obvious. The houses ofprostitution disappeared, and as soon as one of them closed, a cafebegan to operate.

This restriction of prostitution which proved profitable toclandestine loves, evidently arose from the incomprehensible illusionsof men in the matter of carnal life.

Monstrous as it may appear, these haunts satisfied an ideal.

Although the utilitarian tendencies transmitted by heredity anddeveloped by the precocious rudeness and constant brutalities of thecolleges had made the youth of the day strangely crude and asstrangely positive and cold, it had none the less preserved, in theback of their heads, an old blue flower, an old ideal of a vague, souraffection.

Today, when the blood clamored, youths could not bring themselves togo through the formality of entering, ending, paying and leaving; intheir eyes, this was bestiality, the action of a dog attacking a bitchwithout much ado. Then, too, vanity fled unsatisfied from these houseswhere there was no semblance of resistance; there was no victory, nohoped for preference, nor even largess obtained from the tradeswomanwho measured her caresses according to the price. On the contrary, thecourting of a girl of the cafes stimulated all the susceptibilities oflove, all the refinements of sentiment. One disputed with the othersfor such a girl, and those to whom she granted a rendezvous, inconsideration of much money, were sincere in imagining that they hadwon her from a rival, and in so thinking they were the objects ofhonorary distinction and favor.

Yet this domesticity was as stupid, as selfish, as vile as that ofhouses of ill-fame. Its creatures drank without being thirsty, laughedwithout reason, were charmed by the caresses of a slut, quarrelled andfought for no reason whatever, despite everything. The Parisian youthhad not been able to see that these girls were, from the point ofplastic beauty, graceful attitudes and necessary attire, quiteinferior to the women in the bawdy houses! "My God," Des Esseintesexclaimed, "what ninnies are these fellows who flutter around thecafes; for, over and above their silly illusions, they forget thedanger of degraded, suspicious allurements, and they are unaware ofthe sums of money given for affairs priced in advance by the mistress,of the time lost in waiting for an assignation deferred so as toincrease its value and cost, delays which are repeated to provide moretips for the waiters."

This imbecile sentimentality, combined with a ferociously practicalsense, represented the dominant motive of the age. These very personswho would have gouged their neighbors' eyes to gain ten _sous_, lostall presence of mind and discrimination before suspicious lookinggirls in restaurants who pitilessly harassed and relentlessly fleecedthem. Fathers devoted their lives to their businesses and labors,families devoured one another on the pretext of trade, only to berobbed by their sons who, in turn, allowed themselves to be fleeced bywomen who posed as sweethearts to obtain their money.

In all Paris, from east to west and from north to south, there existedan unbroken chain of female tricksters, a system of organized theft,and all because, instead of satisfying men at once, these women wereskilled in the subterfuges of delay.

At bottom, one might say that human wisdom consisted in theprotraction of all things, in saying "no" before saying "yes," for onecould manage people only by trifling with them.

"Ah! if the same were but true of the stomach," sighed Des Esseintes,racked by a cramp which instantly and sharply brought back his mind,that had roved far off, to Fontenay.

Chapter 14

Several days slowly passed thanks to certain measures which succeededin tricking the stomach, but one morning Des Esseintes could endurefood no longer, and he asked himself anxiously whether his alreadyserious weakness would not grow worse and force him to take to bed. Asudden gleam of light relieved his distress; he remembered that one ofhis friends, quite ill at one time, had made use of a Papin's digesterto overcome his anaemia and preserve what little strength he had.

He dispatched his servant to Paris for this precious utensil, andfollowing the directions contained in the prospectus which themanufacturer had enclosed, he himself instructed the cook how to cutthe roast beef into bits, put it into the pewter pot, with a slice ofleek and carrot, and screw on the cover to let it boil for four hours.

At the end of this time the meat fibres were strained. He drank aspoonful of the thick salty juice deposited at the bottom of the pot.Then he felt a warmth, like a smooth caress, descend upon him.

This nourishment relieved his pain and nausea, and even strengthenedhis stomach which did not refuse to accept these few drops of soup.

Thanks to this digester, his neurosis was arrested and Des Esseintessaid to himself: "Well, it is so much gained; perhaps the temperaturewill change, the sky will throw some ashes upon this abominable sunwhich exhausts me, and I shall hold out without accident till thefirst fogs and frosts of winter."

In the torpor and listless ennui in which he was sunk, the disorder ofhis library, whose arrangement had never been completed, irritatedhim. Helpless in his armchair, he had constantly in sight the booksset awry on the shelves propped against each other or lying flat ontheir sides, like a tumbled pack of cards. This disorder offended himthe more when he contrasted it with the perfect order of his religiousworks, carefully placed on parade along the walls.

He tried to clear up the confusion, but after ten minutes of work,perspiration covered him; the effort weakened him. He stretchedhimself on a couch and rang for his servant.

Following his directions, the old man continued the task, bringingeach book in turn to Des Esseintes who examined it and directed whereit was to be placed.

This task did not last long, for Des Esseintes' library contained buta very limited number of contemporary, secular works.

They were drawn through his brain as bands of metal are drawn througha steel-plate from which they issue thin, light, and reduced to almostimperceptible wires; and he had ended by possessing only those bookswhich could submit to such treatment and which were so solidlytempered as to withstand the rolling-mill of each new reading. In hisdesire to refine, he had restrained and almost sterilized hisenjoyment, ever accentuating the irremediable conflict existingbetween his ideas and those of the world in which he had happened tobe born. He had now reached such a pass that he could no longerdiscover any writings to content his secret longings. And hisadmiration even weaned itself from those volumes which had certainlycontributed to sharpen his mind, making it so suspicious and subtle.

In art, his ideas had sprung from a simple point of view. For himschools did not exist, and only the temperament of the writermattered, only the working of his brain interested him, regardless ofthe subject. Unfortunately, this verity of appreciation, worthy ofPalisse, was scarcely applicable, for the simple reason that, evenwhile desiring to be free of prejudices and passion, each personnaturally goes to the works which most intimately correspond with hisown temperament, and ends by relegating all others to the rear.

This work of selection had slowly acted within him; not long ago hehad adored the great Balzac, but as his body weakened and his nervesbecame troublesome, his tastes modified and his admirations changed.

Very soon, and despite the fact that he was aware of his injustice tothe amazing author of the _Comedie humaine_, Des Esseintes had reacheda point where he no longer opened Balzac's books; their healthy spiritjarred on him. Other aspirations now stirred in him, somehow becomingundefinable.

Yet when he probed himself he understood that to attract, a work musthave that character of strangeness demanded by Edgar Allen Poe; but heventured even further on this path and called for Byzantine flora ofbrain and complicated deliquescences of language. He desired atroubled indecision on which he might brood until he could shape it atwill to a more vague or determinate form, according to the momentarystate of his soul. In short, he desired a work of art both for what itwas in itself and for what it permitted him to endow it. He wished topass by means of it into a sphere of sublimated sensation which wouldarouse in him new commotions whose cause he might long and vainly seekto analyze.

In short, since leaving Paris, Des Esseintes was removing himselffurther and further from reality, especially from the contemporaryworld which he held in an ever growing detestation. This hatred hadinevitably reacted on his literary and artistic tastes, and he wouldhave as little as possible to do with paintings and books whoselimited subjects dealt with modern life.

Thus, losing the faculty of admiring beauty indiscriminately underwhatever form it was presented, he preferred Flaubert's _Tentation desaint Antoine_ to his _Education sentimentale_; Goncourt's _Faustin_to his _Germinie Lacerteux_; Zola's _Faute de l'abbe Mouret_ to his_Assommoir_.

This point of view seemed logical to him; these works less immediate,but just as vibrant and human, enabled him to penetrate farther intothe depths of the temperaments of these masters who revealed in themthe most mysterious transports of their being with a more sincereabandon; and they lifted him far above this trivial life which weariedhim so.

In them he entered into a perfect communion of ideas with theirauthors who had written them when their state of soul was analogous tohis own.

In fact, when the period in which a man of talent is obliged to liveis dull and stupid, the artist, though unconsciously, is haunted by anostalgia of some past century.

Finding himself unable to harmonize, save at rare intervals, with theenvironment in which he lives and not discovering sufficientdistraction in the pleasures of observation and analysis, in theexamination of the environment and its people, he feels in himself thedawning of strange ideas. Confused desires for other lands awake andare clarified by reflection and study. Instincts, sensations andthoughts bequeathed by heredity, awake, grow fixed, assert themselveswith an imperious assurance. He recalls memories of beings and thingshe has never really known and a time comes when he escapes from thepenitentiary of his age and roves, in full liberty, into another epochwith which, through a last illusion, he seems more in harmony.

With some, it is a return to vanished ages, to extinct civilizations,to dead epochs; with others, it is an urge towards a fantastic future,to a more or less intense vision of a period about to dawn, whoseimage, by an effect of atavism of which he is unaware, is areproduction of some past age.

In Flaubert this nostalgia is expressed in solemn and majesticpictures of magnificent splendors, in whose gorgeous, barbaric framesmove palpitating and delicate creatures, mysterious and haughty--womengifted, in the perfection of their beauty, with souls capable ofsuffering and in whose depths he discerned frightful derangements, madaspirations, grieved as they were by the haunting premonition of thedissillusionments their follies held in store.

The temperament of this great artist is fully revealed in theincomparable pages of the _Tentation de saint Antoine_ and _Salammbo_where, far from our sorry life, he evokes the splendors of old Asia,the age of fervent prayer and mystic depression, of languorouspassions and excesses induced by the unbearable ennui resulting fromopulence and prayer.

In de Goncourt, it was the nostalgia of the preceding century, areturn to the elegances of a society forever lost. The stupendoussetting of seas beating against jetties, of deserts stretching undertorrid skies to distant horizons, did not exist in his nostalgic workwhich confined itself to a boudoir, near an aulic park, scented withthe voluptuous fragrance of a woman with a tired smile, a perverselittle pout and unresigned, pensive eyes. The soul with which heanimated his characters was not that breathed by Flaubert into hiscreatures, no longer the soul early thrown in revolt by the inexorablecertainty that no new happiness is possible; it was a soul that hadtoo late revolted, after the experience, against all the uselessattempts to invent new spiritual liaisons and to heighten theenjoyment of lovers, which from immemorial times has always ended insatiety.

Although she lived in, and partook of the life of our time, Faustin,by her ancestral influences, was a creature of the past century whosecerebral lassitude and sensual excesses she possessed.

This book of Edmond de Goncourt was one of the volumes which DesEsseintes loved best, and the suggestion of revery which he demandedlived in this work where, under each written line, another line wasetched, visible to the spirit alone, indicated by a hint whichrevealed passion, by a reticence permitting one to divine subtlestates of soul which no idiom could express. And it was no longerFlaubert's language in its inimitable magnificence, but a morbid,perspicacious style, nervous and twisted, keen to note the impalpableimpression that strikes the senses, a style expert in modulating thecomplicated nuances of an epoch which in itself was singularlycomplex. In short, it was the epithet indispensable to decrepitcivilizations, no matter how old they be, which must have words withnew meanings and forms, innovations in phrases and words for theircomplex needs.

At Rome, the dying paganism had modified its prosody and transmutedits language with Ausonius, with Claudian and Rutilius whoseattentive, scrupulous, sonorous and powerful style presented, in itsdescriptive parts especially, reflections, hints and nuances bearingan affinity with the style of de Goncourt.

At Paris, a fact unique in literary history had been consummated. Thatmoribund society of the eighteenth century, which possessed painters,musicians and architects imbued with its tastes and doctrines, had notbeen able to produce a writer who could truly depict its dyingelegances, the quintessence of its joys so cruelly expiated. It hadbeen necessary to await the arrival of de Goncourt (whose temperamentwas formed of memories and regrets made more poignant by the sadspectacle of the intellectual poverty and the pitiful aspirations ofhis own time) to resuscitate, not only in his historical works, buteven more in _Faustin_, the very soul of that period; incarnating itsnervous refinements in this actress who tortured her mind and hersenses so as to savor to exhaustion the grievous revulsives of loveand of art.

With Zola, the nostalgia of the far-away was different. In him was nolonging for vanished ages, no aspiring toward worlds lost in the nightof time. His strong and solid temperament, dazzled with the luxurianceof life, its sanguine forces and moral health, diverted him from theartificial graces and painted chloroses of the past century, as wellas from the hierarchic solemnity, the brutal ferocity and misty,effeminate dreams of the old orient. When he, too, had become obsessedby this nostalgia, by this need, which is nothing less than poetryitself, of shunning the contemporary world he was studying, he hadrushed into an ideal and fruitful country, had dreamed of fantasticpassions of skies, of long raptures of earth, and of fecund rains ofpollen falling into panting organs of flowers. He had ended in agigantic pantheism, had created, unwittingly perhaps, with thisEdenesque environment in which he placed his Adam and Eve, a marvelousHindoo poem, singing, in a style whose broad, crude strokes hadsomething of the bizarre brilliance of an Indian painting, the song ofthe flesh, of animated living matter revealing, to the human creature,by its passion for reproduction the forbidden fruits of love, itssuffocations, its instinctive caresses and natural attitudes.

With Baudelaire, these three masters had most affected Des Esseintesin modern, French, secular literature. But he had read them so often,had saturated himself in them so completely, that in order to absorbthem he had been compelled to lay them aside and let them remainunread on his shelves.

Even now when the servant was arranging them for him, he did not careto open them, and contented himself merely with indicating the placethey were to occupy and seeing that they were properly classified andput away.

The servant brought him a new series of books. These oppressed himmore. They were books toward which his taste had gradually veered,books which diverted him by their very faults from the perfection ofmore vigorous writers. Here, too, Des Esseintes had reached the pointwhere he sought, among these troubled pages, only phrases whichdischarged a sort of electricity that made him tremble; theytransmitted their fluid through a medium which at first sight seemedrefractory.

Their imperfections pleased him, provided they were neither parasiticnor servile, and perhaps there was a grain of truth in his theory thatthe inferior and decadent writer, who is more subjective, thoughunfinished, distills a more irritating aperient and acid balm than theartist of the same period who is truly great. In his opinion, it wasin their turbulent sketches that one perceived the exaltations of themost excitable sensibilities, the caprices of the most morbidpsychological states, the most extravagant depravities of languagecharged, in spite of its rebelliousness, with the difficult task ofcontaining the effervescent salts of sensations and ideas.

Thus, after the masters, he betook himself to a few writers whoattracted him all the more because of the disdain in which they wereheld by the public incapable of understanding them.

One of them was Paul Verlaine who had begun with a volume of verse,the _Poemes Saturniens_, a rather ineffectual book where imitations ofLeconte de Lisle jostled with exercises in romantic rhetoric, butthrough which already filtered the real personality of the poet insuch poems as the sonnet _Reve Familier_.

In searching for his antecedents, Des Esseintes discovered, under thehesitant strokes of the sketches, a talent already deeply affected byBaudelaire, whose influence had been accentuated later on, acquiescedin by the peerless master; but the imitation was never flagrant.

And in some of his books, _Bonne Chanson_, _Fetes Galantes_, _Romancessans paroles_, and his last volume, _Sagesse_, were poems where hehimself was revealed as an original and outstanding figure.

With rhymes obtained from verb tenses, sometimes even from longadverbs preceded by a monosyllable from which they fell as from a rockinto a heavy cascade of water, his verses, divided by improbablecaesuras, often became strangely obscure with their audacious ellipsesand strange inaccuracies which none the less did not lack grace.

With his unrivalled ability to handle metre, he had sought torejuvenate the fixed poetic forms. He turned the tail of the sonnetinto the air, like those Japanese fish of polychrome clay which reston stands, their heads straight down, their tails on top. Sometimes hecorrupted it by using only masculine rhymes to which he seemedpartial. He had often employed a bizarre form--a stanza of three lineswhose middle verse was unrhymed, and a tiercet with but one rhyme,followed by a single line, an echoing refrain like "Dansons la Gigue"in _Streets_. He had employed other rhymes whose dim echoes arerepeated in remote stanzas, like faint reverberations of a bell.

But his personality expressed itself most of all in vague anddelicious confidences breathed in hushed accents, in the twilight. Healone had been able to reveal the troubled Ultima Thules of the soul;low whisperings of thoughts, avowals so haltingly and murmuringlyconfessed that the ear which hears them remains hesitant, passing onto the soul languors quickened by the mystery of this suggestion whichis divined rather than felt. Everything characteristic of Verlaine wasexpressed in these adorable verses of the _Fetes Galantes_:

It was no longer the immense horizon opened by the unforgettableportals of Baudelaire; it was a crevice in the moonlight, opening on afield which was more intimate and more restrained, peculiar toVerlaine who had formulated his poetic system in those lines of whichDes Esseintes was so fond:

Des Esseintes had followed him with delight in his most diversifiedworks. After his _Romances sans paroles_ which had appeared in ajournal, Verlaine had preserved a long silence, reappearing later inthose charming verses, hauntingly suggestive of the gentle and coldaccents of Villon, singing of the Virgin, "removed from our days ofcarnal thought and weary flesh." Des Esseintes often re-read _Sagesse_whose poems provoked him to secret reveries, a fanciful love for aByzantine Madonna who, at a certain moment, changed into a distractedmodern Cydalise so mysterious and troubling that one could not knowwhether she aspired toward depravities so monstrous that they becameirresistible, or whether she moved in an immaculate dream where theadoration of the soul floated around her ever unavowed and ever pure.

There were other poets, too, who induced him to confide himself tothem: Tristan Corbiere who, in 1873, in the midst of the generalapathy had issued a most eccentric volume entitled: _Les Amoursjaunes_. Des Esseintes who, in his hatred of the banal andcommonplace, would gladly have accepted the most affected folly andthe most singular extravagance, spent many enjoyable hours with thiswork where drollery mingled with a disordered energy, and wheredisconcerting lines blazed out of poems so absolutely obscure as thelitanies of _Sommeil_, that they qualified their author for the nameof

Obscene confesseur des devotes mort-nees.

The style was hardly French. The author wrote in the negro dialect,was telegraphic in form, suppressed verbs, affected a teasingphraseology, revelled in the impossible puns of a travelling salesman;then out of this jumble, laughable conceits and sly affectationsemerged, and suddenly a cry of keen anguish rang out, like thesnapping string of a violoncello. And with all this, in his hardrugged style, bristling with obsolescent words and unexpectedneologisms, flashed perfect originalities, treasures of expression andsuperbly nomadic lines amputated of rhyme. Finally, over and above his_Poemes Parisiens_, where Des Esseintes had discovered this profounddefinition of woman:

Eternel feminin de l'eternel jocrisse

Tristan Corbiere had celebrated in a powerfully concise style, the Seaof Brittany, mermaids and the Pardon of Saint Anne. And he had evenrisen to an eloquence of hate in the insults he hurled, apropos of theConlie camp, at the individuals whom he designated under the name of"foreigners of the Fourth of September."

The raciness of which he was so fond, which Corbiere offered him inhis sharp epithets, his beauties which ever remained a trifle suspect,Des Esseintes found again in another poet, Theodore Hannon, a discipleof Baudelaire and Gautier, moved by a very unusual sense of theexquisite and the artificial.

Unlike Verlaine whose work was directly influenced by Baudelaire,especially on the psychological side, in his insidious nuances ofthought and skilful quintessence of sentiment, Theodore Hannonespecially descended from the master on the plastic side, by theexternal vision of persons and things.

His charming corruption fatally corresponded to the tendencies of DesEsseintes who, on misty or rainy days, enclosed himself in the retreatfancied by the poet and intoxicated his eyes with the rustlings of hisfabrics, with the incandescence of his stones, with his exclusivelymaterial sumptuousness which ministered to cerebral reactions, androse like a cantharides powder in a cloud of fragrant incense toward aBrussel idol with painted face and belly stained by the perfumes.

With the exception of the works of these poets and of StephaneMallarme, which his servant was told to place to one side so that hemight classify them separately, Des Esseintes was but slightlyattracted towards the poets.

Notwithstanding the majestic form and the imposing quality of hisverse which struck such a brilliant note that even the hexameters ofHugo seemed pale in comparison, Leconte de Lisle could no longersatisfy him. The antiquity so marvelously restored by Flaubertremained cold and immobile in his hands. Nothing palpitated in hisverses, which lacked depth and which, most often, contained no idea.Nothing moved in those gloomy, waste poems whose impassive mythologiesended by finally leaving him cold. Too, after having long delighted inGautier, Des Esseintes reached the point where he no longer cared forhim. The admiration he felt for this man's incomparable painting hadgradually dissolved; now he was more astonished than ravished by hisdescriptions. Objects impressed themselves upon Gautier's perceptiveeyes but they went no further, they never penetrated deeper into hisbrain and flesh. Like a giant mirror, this writer constantly limitedhimself to reflecting surrounding objects with impersonal clearness.Certainly, Des Esseintes still loved the works of these two poets, ashe loved rare stones and precious objects, but none of the variationsof these perfect instrumentalists could hold him longer, neither beingevocative of revery, neither opening for him, at least, broad roads ofescape to beguile the tedium of dragging hours.

These two books left him unsatisfied. And it was the same with Hugo;the oriental and patriarchal side was too conventional and barren todetain him. And his manners, at once childish and that of agrandfather, exasperated him. He had to go to the _Chansons des rueset des bois_ to enjoy the perfect acrobatics of his metrics. But howgladly, after all, would he not have exchanged all this _tour deforce_ for a new work by Baudelaire which might equal the others, forhe, decidedly, was almost the only one whose verses, under theirsplendid form, contained a healing and nutritive substance. In passingfrom one extreme to the other, from form deprived of ideas to ideasdeprived of form, Des Esseintes remained no less circumspect and cold.The psychological labyrinths of Stendhal, the analytical detours ofDuranty seduced him, but their administrative, colorless and aridlanguage, their static prose, fit at best for the wretched industry ofthe theatre, repelled him. Then their interesting works and theirastute analyses applied to brains agitated by passions in which he wasno longer interested. He was not at all concerned with generalaffections or points of view, with associations of common ideas, nowthat the reserve of his mind was more keenly developed and that he nolonger admitted aught but superfine sensations and catholic or sensualtorments. To enjoy a work which should combine, according to hiswishes, incisive style with penetrating and feline analysis, he had togo to the master of induction, the profound and strange Edgar AllenPoe, for whom, since the time when he re-read him, his preference hadnever wavered.

More than any other, perhaps, he approached, by his intimate affinity,Des Esseintes' meditative cast of mind.

If Baudelaire, in the hieroglyphics of the soul, had deciphered thereturn of the age of sentiment and ideas, Poe, in the field of morbidpsychology had more especially investigated the domain of the soul.

Under the emblematic title, _The Demon of Perversity_, he had been thefirst in literature to pry into the irresistible, unconscious impulsesof the will which mental pathology now explains more scientifically.He had also been the first to divulge, if not to signal the impressiveinfluence of fear which acts on the will like an anaesthetic,paralyzing sensibility and like the curare, stupefying the nerves. Itwas on the problem of the lethargy of the will, that Poe had centeredhis studies, analyzing the effects of this moral poison, indicatingthe symptoms of its progress, the troubles commencing with anxiety,continuing through anguish, ending finally in the terror which deadensthe will without intelligence succumbing, though sorely disturbed.Death, which the dramatists had so much abused, he had in some mannerchanged and made more poignant, by introducing an algebraic andsuperhuman element; but in truth, it was less the real agony of thedying person which he described and more the moral agony of thesurvivor, haunted at the death bed by monstrous hallucinationsengendered by grief and fatigue. With a frightful fascination, hedwelt on acts of terror, on the snapping of the will, coldly reasoningabout them, little by little making the reader gasp, suffocated andpanting before these feverish mechanically contrived nightmares.

Convulsed by hereditary neurosis, maddened by a moral St. Vitus dance,Poe's creatures lived only through their nerves; his women, theMorellas and Ligeias, possessed an immense erudition. They weresteeped in the mists of German philosophy and the cabalistic mysteriesof the old Orient; and all had the boyish and inert breasts of angels,all were sexless.

Baudelaire and Poe, these two men who had often been compared becauseof their common poetic strain and predilection for the examination ofmental maladies, differed radically in the affective conceptions whichheld such a large place in their works; Baudelaire with his iniquitousand debased loves--cruel loves which made one think of the reprisalsof an inquisition; Poe with his chaste, aerial loves, in which thesenses played no part, where only the mind functioned withoutcorresponding to organs which, if they existed, remained foreverfrozen and virgin. This cerebral clinic where, vivisecting in astifling atmosphere, that spiritual surgeon became, as soon as hisattention flagged, a prey to an imagination which evoked, likedelicious miasmas, somnambulistic and angelic apparitions, was to DesEsseintes a source of unwearying conjecture. But now that his nervousdisorders were augmented, days came when his readings broke his spiritand when, hands trembling, body alert, like the desolate Usher he washaunted by an unreasoning fear and a secret terror.

Thus he was compelled to moderate his desires, and he rarely touchedthese fearful elixirs, in the same way that he could no longer withimpunity visit his red corridor and grow ecstatic at the sight of thegloomy Odilon Redon prints and the Jan Luyken horrors. And yet, whenhe felt inclined to read, all literature seemed to him dull afterthese terrible American imported philtres. Then he betook himself toVilliers de L'Isle Adam in whose scattered works he noted seditiousobservations and spasmodic vibrations, but which no longer gave one,with the exception of his Claire Lenoir, such troubling horror.

This Claire Lenoir which appeared in 1867 in the _Revue des lettres etdes arts_, opened a series of tales comprised under the title of_Histoires Moroses_ where against a background of obscure speculationsborrowed from old Hegel, dislocated creatures stirred, Dr. TribulatBonhomet, solemn and childish, a Claire Lenoir, farcical and sinister,with blue spectacles, round and large as franc pieces, which coveredher almost dead eyes.

This story centered about a simple adultery and ended with aninexpressible terror when Bonhomet, opening Claire's eyelids, as shelies in her death bed, and penetrating them with monstrous plummets,distinctively perceives the reflection of the husband brandishing thelover's decapitated head, while shouting a war song, like a Kanaka.

Based on this more or less just observation that the eyes of certainanimals, cows for instance, preserve even to decomposition, likephotographic plates, the image of the beings and things their eyesbehold at the moment they expire, this story evidently derived fromPoe, from whom he appropriated the terrifying and elaborate technique.

This also applied to the _Intersigne_, which had later been joined tothe _Contes cruels_, a collection of indisputable talent in which wasfound _Vera_, which Des Esseintes considered a little masterpiece.

Here, the hallucination was marked with an exquisite tenderness; nolonger was it the dark mirages of the American author, but the fluid,warm, almost celestial vision; it was in an identical genre, thereverse of the Beatrices and Legeias, those gloomy and dark phantomsengendered by the inexorable nightmare of opium.

This story also put in play the operations of the will, but it nolonger treated of its defeats and helplessness under the effects offear; on the contrary, it studied the exaltations of the will underthe impulse of a fixed idea; it demonstrated its power which oftensucceeded in saturating the atmosphere and in imposing its qualitieson surrounding objects.

Another book by Villiers de L'Isle Adam, _Isis_, seemed to him curiousin other respects. The philosophic medley of Clair Lenoir was evidentin this work which offered an unbelievable jumble of verbal andtroubled observations, souvenirs of old melodramas, poniards and ropeladders--all the romanticism which Villiers de L'Isle Adam could neverrejuvenate in his _Elen_ and _Morgane_, forgotten pieces published byan obscure man, Sieur Francisque Guyon.

The heroine of this book, Marquise Tullia Fabriana, reputed to haveassimilated the Chaldean science of the women of Edgar Allen Poe, andthe diplomatic sagacities of Stendhal, had the enigmatic countenanceof Bradamante abused by an antique Circe. These insoluble mixturesdeveloped a fuliginous vapor across which philosophic and literaryinfluences jostled, without being able to be regulated in the author'sbrain when he wrote the prolegomenae of this work which could not haveembraced less than seven volumes.

But there was another side to Villiers' temperament. It was piercingand acute in an altogether different sense--a side of forbiddingpleasantry and fierce raillery. No longer was it the paradoxicalmystifications of Poe, but a scoffing that had in it the lugubriousand savage comedy which Swift possessed. A series of sketches, _lesDemoiselles de Bienfilatre_, _l'Affichage celeste_, _la Machine agloire_, and _le Plus beau diner du monde_, betrayed a singularlyinventive and keenly bantering mind. The whole order of contemporaryand utilitarian ideas, the whole commercialized baseness of the agewere glorified in stories whose poignant irony transported DesEsseintes.

No other French book had been written in this serious and bitterstyle. At the most, a tale by Charles Cros, _La science de l'amour_,printed long ago in the _Revue du Monde-Nouveau_, could astonish byreason of its chemical whims, by its affected humor and by its coldlyfacetious observations. But the pleasure to be extracted from thestory was merely relative, since its execution was a dismal failure.The firm, colored and often original style of Villiers had disappearedto give way to a mixture scraped on the literary bench of thefirst-comer.

"Heavens! heavens! how few books are really worth re-reading," sighedDes Esseintes, gazing at the servant who left the stool on which hehad been perched, to permit Des Esseintes to survey his books with asingle glance.

Des Esseintes nodded his head. But two small books remained on thetable. With a sigh, he dismissed the old man, and turned over theleaves of a volume bound in onager skin which had been glazed by ahydraulic press and speckled with silver clouds. It was held togetherby fly-leaves of old silk damask whose faint patterns held that charmof faded things celebrated by Mallarme in an exquisite poem.

These pages, numbering nine, had been extracted from copies of the twofirst Parnassian books; it was printed on parchment paper and precededby this title: _Quelques vers de Mallarme_, designed in a surprisingcalligraphy in uncial letters, illuminated and relieved with gold, asin old manuscripts.

Among the eleven poems brought together in these covers, severalinvited him: _Les fenetres_, _l'epilogue_ and _Azur_; but one amongthem all, a fragment of the _Herodiade_, held him at certain hours ina spell.

How often, beneath the lamp that threw a low light on the silentchamber, had he not felt himself haunted by this Herodiade who, in thework of Gustave Moreau, was now plunged in gloom revealing but a dimwhite statue in a brazier extinguished by stones.

The darkness concealed the blood, the reflections and the golds, hidthe temple's farther sides, drowned the supernumeraries of the crimeenshrouded in their dead colors, and, only sparing the aquerellewhites, revealed the woman's jewels and heightened her nudity.

At such times he was forced to gaze upon her unforgotten outlines; andshe lived for him, her lips articulating those bizarre and delicatelines which Mallarme makes her utter:

These lines he loved, as he loved the works of this poet who, in anage of democracy devoted to lucre, lived his solitary and literarylife sheltered by his disdain from the encompassing stupidity,delighting, far from society, in the surprises of the intellect, incerebral visions, refining on subtle ideas, grafting Byzantinedelicacies upon them, perpetuating them in suggestions lightlyconnected by an almost imperceptible thread.

These twisted and precious ideas were bound together with an adhesiveand secret language full of phrase contractions, ellipses and boldtropes.

Perceiving the remotest analogies, with a single term which by aneffect of similitude at once gave the form, the perfume, the color andthe quality, he described the object or being to which otherwise hewould have been compelled to place numerous and different epithets soas to disengage all their facets and nuances, had he simply contentedhimself with indicating the technical name. Thus he succeeded indispensing with the comparison, which formed in the reader's mind byanalogy as soon as the symbol was understood. Neither was theattention of the reader diverted by the enumeration of the qualitieswhich the juxtaposition of adjectives would have induced.Concentrating upon a single word, he produced, as for a picture, theensemble, a unique and complete aspect.

It became a concentrated literature, an essential unity, a sublimateof art. This style was at first employed with restraint in his earlierworks, but Mallarme had boldly proclaimed it in a verse on TheophileGautier and in _l'Apres-midi du faune_, an eclogue where thesubtleties of sensual joys are described in mysterious and caressingverses suddenly pierced by this wild, rending faun cry:

That line with the monosyllable _lys_ like a sprig, evoked the imageof something rigid, slender and white; it rhymed with the substantive_ingenuite_, allegorically expressing, by a single term, the passion,the effervescence, the fugitive mood of a virgin faun amorouslydistracted by the sight of nymphs.

In this extraordinary poem, surprising and unthought of images leapedup at the end of each line, when the poet described the elations andregrets of the faun contemplating, at the edge of a fen, the tufts ofreeds still preserving, in its transitory mould, the form made by thenaiades who had occupied it.

Then, Des Esseintes also experienced insidious delights in touchingthis diminutive book whose cover of Japan vellum, as white as curdledmilk, were held together by two silk bands, one of Chinese rose, the